Muslim Persecution of Christians Escalating in Pakistan

There is no provision in Pakistan’s blasphemy law to punish a false accuser or a false witness. Since 1990, more than 65 Christians have been killed for “blasphemy;” more than 165 cases are waiting for verdicts.

by Mohshin Habib

In recent years, the Christians of Pakistan have become one of the most vulnerable religious communities in the world. Most of the time, the Pakistani extremists use two common accusations to persecute the Christians: defamatory remarks toward Mohammed, and burning pages of Quran.

Christians in Pakistan, a news site on behalf of the Pakistani Christian community, predicted that the situation is becoming alarming. The site alleges that there are currently many cases being reported of Christians being targeted, but no action to reform or address the problem by any government official.

In a recent incident in Badami Bagh near Pakistan’s eastern city of Lahore, Sawan Masih, a Pakistani Christian and two Muslims were quarreling over the drinking of alcohol. Four days later, on March 9, the Muslims accused him of insulting the Prophet Muhammad — in Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Sudan and Iran, under blasphemy laws, an allegation punishable by death.

Police quickly arrested Masih, but a massive mob of 3000 Muslims wanted police to hand “the blasphemer” over to them. The mob attacked the Joseph colony, a poor Christian neighborhood, and burned 180 houses. Two churches were vandalized. The Asian Human Rights Commission stated, “on March 8, during the Friday prayers it was announced through the mosque loud speaker that Masih committed blasphemy by passing remarks against the last prophet of Islam. The police who were already prepared arrested Masih when a crowed attacked the community. In the ensuing incident they beat Masih’s father seriously. The police asked the community to vacate the area, as there were chances of further attacks, totally ignoring their responsibility to protect members of the religious community. The police left the area thereby providing a perfect opportunity for the attackers to return the next day, March 9.” In fear of Muslim reprisals, Christians rapidly fled the area, leaving behind homes and households….

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Rimsha Masih’s Unending Nightmare

By Frank Crimi

After being acquitted in January 2013 of blasphemy charges, Pakistan’s Supreme Court has now reopened the case against Rimsha Masih, a 14-year-old Pakistani Christian girl believed to suffer from mental disabilities.

Rimsha’s case had drawn international attention as well as corresponding outrage after the young girl was arrested  at her home in August 2012 and charged with blasphemy upon being accused by a Muslim neighbor of allegedly burning pages from a Koran.

It should be noted that running afoul of Pakistan’s notorious blasphemy laws can earn sentences of death or life in prison for those convicted of desecrating Islam’s holy book or insulting its Prophet Muhammad.

For her part, Rimsha, who worked as a maid at the time, denied through her attorney any blasphemous wrongdoing, claiming she was simply burning garbage and “did not know a Koranic book was among the papers because she cannot read.”

Moreover, Pakistan’s Minister for National Harmony, Paul Bhatti, said that given Rimsha’s mental disorder, it was unlikely the young girl had “purposefully desecrated the Koran.”

Unfortunately, Rimsha’s illiteracy and mental impairment were not persuasive enough arguments in which to prevent Pakistani police from incarcerating the young girl for the alleged heretical act.

Yet, in September 2012, Rimsha’s case seemingly took a turn for the better when Pakistani police arrested a local Muslim cleric, Hafiz Mohammed Khalid Chishti, and charged him with planting the burned Koranic pages in an effort to frame Rimsha.

According to a police official Chishti “put pages into the ashes, showed them to the people of the area, and gathered them to attack the girl’s house.”

Those charges were corroborated by three officials from Chishti’s mosque who told a judge that Chishti’s attempt to incriminate Rimsha was part of a broader plan by the cleric to oust Christians living in the poor Mehrabad neighborhood of Islamabad where Rimsha and her family lived.

Of course, that revelation most likely raised few eyebrows given that Pakistan’s blasphemy statutes are often used and abused to either settle personal scores or as weapons in which persecute religious minorities, such as Christians, Hindus and Ahmadis.

Still, the officials testified that they had urged Chishti to not go through with his plan, efforts which apparently had little effect on the Imam who reportedly replied, “You know, this is the only way to expel the Christians from this area.”….

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How horrible to be a woman in Pakistan

The Rape and Murder of Pakistan’s Christian Children

by:  Raymond Ibrahim

Pakistani children mourn relatives who were massacred in their church. (Photo: Reuters)The West sighed in relief when Rimsha Masih, the 14-year-old Christian girl arrested in Pakistan on August 16 for allegedly burning pages of the Quran, was finally released.  Yet the West remains clueless concerning the graphic abuses—including rape and murder—Christian children in Pakistan routinely suffer, simply for being Christian.  Consider two stories alone, both of which occurred at the same time Rimsha’s blasphemy ordeal was making headlines around the world.

On August 14, another Christian girl, 12-year-old Muqadas Kainat (which means “Holy Universe”) was ambushed in a field near her home in Sahawil by five Muslim men who “gang raped and murdered” her.  At the time, her father was at a hospital visiting her sick mother.  He and other family members began a frantic search, until a tip led them to the field where his daughter’s body lay.  The postmortem revealed that she had been “gang raped and later strangled to death by five men.”  Police, as usual, did not arrest anyone.  As a Salem News report puts it, “Complicating matters is the fact that several Christian girls in this remote area have been raped and forced to both marry into the Muslim community and abandon their own religion, human rights groups report…. there is a history in this part of Pakistan according to the Christian community, of local authorities failing to investigate cases of rape or other violence against Christians, often for fear of influential Muslims or militants.”

Similarly, on August 20, an 11-year-old Christian boy, Samuel Yaqoob, went to the markets of Faisalabad to buy food for his family, never to return.  According to Wilson Chowdhry, Chairman of the British Pakistani Christian Association, “After extensive searching his body was found near a drain in the Christian colony, bearing marks of horrific torture, with the murder weapon nearby.  His nose, lips and belly had been sliced off, and his family could hardly recognize him because the body was so badly burnt. Some 23 wounds by a sharp weapon have beenShazia, one of the 12-year-old Christian girls enslaved, raped, and murdered by a Pakistani Muslim who wasn’t ever convicted. identified in the autopsy. When sending his body for an autopsy, police raised the possibility of sodomy.  Parts of Pakistani culture have a strong homosexual pederast culture, and Christian and other minority boys are especially susceptible to rape and abuse because of the powerlessness of their community and their despised status.  In one case fairly recently, a Christian boy was kidnapped, raped, tortured and killed by a police officer, his body similarly being dumped in a drain.”…

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1. A Muslim man murdered a teenage Christian girl, Amariah, during an attempted rape: he had “grabbed the girl and, under the threat of a gun, tried to drag her away. The young woman resisted, trying to escape the clutches of her attacker, when the man opened fire and killed her instantly, and later tried to conceal the corpse” (Dec, 2011).
2. Muslims abducted a 14-year-old Christian girl, Mehek, at gunpoint in broad daylight from her parents’ house.  One of her abductors declared he would “purify her” by making her “Muslim and my mistress” (Aug, 2011).
3. Shazia, a 12-year-old Christian girl, was enslaved, raped, and murdered by Chaudhry Naeem, a rich Muslim lawyer, who was acquitted.  His wife and son had participated in abusing the child (Nov, 2010).
4. Nadia, a Christian girl who was abducted in 2001 when she was 15-years-old and forced to marry a Muslim, only recently returned to her Catholic family (Jan, 2012).
5. A powerful Muslim businessman had two Christian sisters kidnapped, forced to convert to Islam, and “married” to him (May, 2011).

In every one of these cases, Pakistani police either failed to act or sided with the rapists and murderers…..

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How Pakistani Mullahs Mislead The World With Their Doublespeak

Watch a Mullah’s liberal face to the West — and his real face at home:

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